Preserving the Past

Why does Sloss engender such strong feelings of support? And equally strong feelings among a few that it should be torn down?

Precisely because it is a huge artifactual reminder of our history over the past 120 years. Every major social upheaval in Birmingham was recorded in the workplace. As a very visible reminder of that history, Sloss evokes the emotions of these events. Whether those events included the celebration of the birth of a city i.e. the casting of the statue of Vulcan from Sloss Iron for the World’s Fair in 1904, or the upheavals of the Civil Rights movement in the 1960’s Sloss was there and so were its employees. And it is in its work force that Sloss meets its most important historical resource.

1. It is the employees who built and operated Sloss and 52 other furnaces in the Birmingham District that built this City.
2. It is people who moved from the rural countryside that operated the foundries, operated the furnaces, mined the coal and worked in the cast iron pipe companies that provided the human raw material from which the City of Birmingham was built and have a sweat equity ownership of this city.
3. It is the stories of these people, told on the site on which they labored – told in their own words - that make Sloss a uniquely qualified place to tell the story of Birmingham.